Atom Bomb Angel

  ‘Yeah, not bad, eh? New York is an okay place for the not bad-looking girls.’ Sleder grinned.

  ‘You’re right. That receptionist you’ve got – she’s really something.’

  ‘Yeah, she’s quite something.’ Sleder waved his hand in an expansive gesture. ‘Why don’t you ask her out tonight – have a bit of fun in New York before you go back to your wife?’

  ‘I can’t – it’s her birthday today.’

  ‘So? She’ll have another one next year.’

  ‘But I—’

  Sleder silenced him with a wave of his hand, and pressed the intercom. ‘Barbara, darling, what are you doing this evening?’

  ‘Well, I – er, I – do have a date, Mr Sleder.’

  ‘An important one?’

  ‘Well, I guess not.’

  ‘Perhaps you could cancel it? My good friend Mr Slan is stopping over in New York tonight and he doesn’t know his way around the city too well. It would be a good idea for him to have a pretty girl to keep him out of trouble, don’t you think?’

  She didn’t think it was a good idea at all, in fact she thought it was a rotten idea; but her contract stated that unless she’d given two weeks’ prior notice of any date, she could be requested to cancel it.

  ‘Why don’t you book a table for two,’ continued Sleder, ‘somewhere nice and romantic. I would join you, but I have a meeting that I’m afraid is going to continue until very late.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Sleder.’

  The meeting that was going to continue very late came in and asked if anyone would like more coffee, then removed the dirty cups and herself from Slan’s transfixed gaze.

  ‘Er – I really do have to get back to Adamsville tonight. My wife – she’ll—’

  ‘There is no schedule airline that can get you back today. The earliest is tomorrow morning. If my aeroplane were to break down, the earliest you could be back home would be midday tomorrow.’

  ‘But your jet hasn’t broken down,’ said Slan.

  Sleder grinned. ‘If I tell you I’ve just heard that it has, does that clear your conscience?’

  ‘You’ve already shown me what a high regard you have for the truth.’

  ‘Well, it has broken down. So, to make up for everything, there’s a limousine and driver at your disposal to take you around New York, anywhere you’d like to go. My secretary will give you some expenses money, and a bit over to buy your wife a nice little something. Come back about half five and collect Barbara. And you don’t have to worry about a hotel – we have a hospitality apartment here that I am sure you will find more than adequate. You’ll get a good night’s sleep – if you want it – but who needs sleep when you’re in New York, eh Harry?’

  ‘Sure, who the hell does!’ grinned Slan, beginning to feel a bit better.

  ‘I’ll call you in three weeks, and you can tell me whether you are going to start buying the fuel direct, or whether I should start contacting your customers. Have a nice day!’

  The grin fell from Slan’s face, but before he had time to ask any more questions, Sleder had shaken his hand, steered him through the double doors into the anteroom, where the girl in the Woolmark label had placed an envelope containing one thousand dollars in cash into his hand, and steered him into the outer room; the security guards had guided him into the elevator, which deposited him at the sixty-fourth floor reception area.

  He walked up to the receptionist. ‘Call for you at five thirty, Barbara?’

  ‘Can hardly wait, Harry,’ she beamed warmly, lying through her glistening teeth and Peach-Blossom Glow Max Factor lipstick.

  Slan took the lift down to the ground floor. He was looking forward to tonight; he hadn’t much to look forward to beyond that.

  15

  After Gelignite hung up on me, I despatched the least incompetent of my fresh-faced minions to go and watch Whalley for me, and then crashed out for a couple of hours. I woke up at eight feeling considerably worse than when I had lain down, made myself three cups of thick black coffee in a row, then drove in to Portico. I drove past the entrance of all three ramps to see if anyone was keeping watch, and it didn’t seem that anyone was.

  I first made a couple of calls. The navy Marina of the night before hadn’t yielded any clues, and the address on the licence the driver had given Hertz was false. The contact with the Capri had got away without being spotted. It was a good start.

  I switched on the tape recorder and played the tape of Whalley and his contact several times. After an hour and a half, I was satisfied I had picked up all that was of interest: the name Wojara, which at the moment meant nothing; and the name Ben Tsenong, which also meant nothing; the contact’s voice, which I had heard before, meant something, although right now, I didn’t know what. He had driven one hundred miles; that was interesting, but there are one hell of a lot of places within a one-hundred-mile radius of Worcester. The contact had said ‘niggers’; that was very interesting. Up until now, we had only encountered Arabs; Arabs weren’t blacks. Whalley talked about gearing for a specific day, what did he mean by that? 4 January or the first day after that on which there is a westerly wind. Wind; Fifeshire had talked about wind – wind spread radiation. Westerlies were the prevailing winds over the British Isles. 4 January; I tried to figure out the significance of that date; it was a Monday. New Year’s Day was on the Friday. I went down to the library, one floor below, and looked up religious holidays; there were none on 4 January. There was no event scheduled for 4 January in any publication at all. I turned my attention to the wind, and pulled out the massive Times atlas of the world, and furrowed through until I came to the world wind-flow charts. The January chart showed the westerly winds sweeping across the Atlantic, across Spain, France and the British Isles, and then on, up towards the Arctic. In the months following January, the charts showed the same wind direction across the Atlantic, but after crossing Northern Europe, instead of curving up towards the Arctic, the winds curved down and across Russia. I thought about it for some moments; if nuclear power stations in England were going to be blown up and Fifeshire was right with his figures that fall-out could be damaging two thousand miles downwind, if the Russians wanted to be sure of not being swept by winds that had crossed England, then the safest month for them would be January.

  It could well be that there was a completely different and much better explanation for the significance of 4 January, but I had to start trying to put the pieces somewhere. I went back up to my tiny office – cubicle would be a more accurate definition. The Security Services’ answer to defence-budget cuts was to reduce the amount of space its staff occupied. If they cut the size of my office much further, it was going to require a shoe-horn to get me in and out. Part of the idea was, of course, to discourage us from spending too much time indoors on our backsides; it was very effective.

  I telephoned the bursar’s office at Balliol College, Oxford. The woman who answered was polite and helpful. I told her I was from The Times, preparing an article for the next Educational Supplement, on overseas students at Britain’s universities, and asked her what she could tell me about Ben Tsenong. She confirmed that a Ben Tsenong was registered. He was studying nuclear physics, in his third year; he came from Namibia, and was on a United Nations scholarship. She suggested that if I wanted more information, I should write to him.

  Not having any great conviction that becoming a pen pal with Tsenong would provide me with the sort of information I was after, I decided to go and pay his room a visit. Two hours later, I was in my Jag, negotiating the double hazard of driving rain and a thick wadge of cyclists pedalling with their eyes shut against it. Oxford didn’t look its best in the November rain; it wasn’t the sort of day for whipping out the Instamatic and snapping the sights. The windscreen had decided it was going to fog up and stay fogged up, and no amount of persuasion from either the de-mister or a duster could make it change its mind.

  There was a parking bay in the centre of the street past the Sheldonian Theatre, and I pulled
in there. I shoved three coins in the parking ticket dispenser and lost them all. I banged the machine with my fist, then walked across to Balliol and into the porter’s lodge. A list of students was pinned up on the wall; Tsenong’s name and room number was on it, and I was relieved that he was staying in college, and I didn’t have to go traipsing around Oxford looking for his lodgings.

  On the wall behind the porter’s desk was a plaque which read: Ezra Hancock d. 1911 A better friend no man had. I hoped the same applied to his replacement. ‘Can you tell me where 11/7 is, please?’

  Ezra Hancock’s replacement turned out to be a chip off the old block. I got the directions to Tsenong’s room, and I got the names of all his immediate neighbours. Other than knowing he was black, the porter couldn’t give me much information about Tsenong. I thanked him and went out. I stopped in the shelter of the arch outside the lodge door, checked to make sure no one was looking, then pulled a cap from my pocket and pulled it over my head; I also put on a large pair of dark glasses, pulled my coat collar right up, then took a scarf from my pocket and wrapped it around my neck several times. It would have taken someone with X-ray eyes to know it was me inside that lot.

  I walked through the arch, round the edge of the oval lawn of the Front Quad, with its grass that would make the surface of the snooker table look like a derelict golf course, through the Old Balliol gates and across the Garden Quad. I went in the entrance to staircase eleven, and climbed the steps. Number seven was on the second floor. I knocked on the door. A rather strained voice said, ‘Come in,’ and I cursed. I had hoped no one would be in. I pushed the door open, and saw a thin black youth seated at a desk by the window. His face could have been good-looking but for a pallor of tiredness and a scowl that made thick lines across it. He looked over his shoulder at me and I saw hatred in his eyes. It wasn’t hatred of me in particular. The hatred in those eyes had been there a long time before I knocked on the door.

  ‘James Gilbert?’ I said.

  ‘No – the floor below.’

  ‘The floor below? That’s where I was – they said he was on this floor.’

  ‘Well, he isn’t; he’s right below me.’

  ‘Ah – you must be Mr Kershaw?’

  ‘No. My name is Tsenong. Kershaw is further down the corridor.’

  ‘I thought that porter was a bit dim. Sorry to have bothered you.’

  Tsenong turned back to his studies without replying. I closed the door. Right. Now I knew what he looked like. The next step was to wait until he went out. I walked back across the Quad and into the shelter of the archway. The porter had told me there were only two exits from Tsenong’s room – either the door or the fire escape. Both would bring him out into the Quad, and from the shelter of the arch I had a clear view. I removed my cap, glasses and scarf, and turned my coat inside out; it was reversible, and now showed black on the outside instead of white. If Tsenong walked right past me, he would have no reason to recognize me. I had a feeling I was in for a long wait, because he had looked settled into his books. I looked idly out at the teeming rain, and thought about the events of the day.

  After leaving Portico, by a different exit from the one I had used the previous night, I spotted a shiny green Ford Escort slide out into the traffic. There was only a driver in the car; no one else. I turned down to the Mall, around Buckingham Palace and up towards Hyde Park Corner. The Escort sat well back. More for amusement than anything else, I turned from Hyde Park Corner into St George’s Street and drove into Belgrave Square, where I suddenly pulled over sharply to the left to a florist stand. The Escort was caught completely on the hop. I left him to circle several times around Belgrave Square, while I made a slow and ponderous attempt to decide which bunch to buy for my sick aunt in Maidenhead, before telling the not very amused vendor that I had just remembered she was allergic to flowers, and then drove off.

  I decided I would take the Escort for a drive down Walton Street. Walton Street is a smart, narrow street, lined with restaurants, art galleries, and precious little shops staffed by horsey ladies who talk to each other as if they are shouting from distant lavatory seats.

  The doyen of the Walton Street restaurants is Walton’s, which once had the dubious distinction of being blown up by the IRA. In front of this restaurant, the road hooks sharply to the right and comes to a traffic light. It is rare to find an occasion, day or night, when there isn’t a bottleneck in Walton Street and today, fortunately, was no exception. I ground to a halt in the jam, about fifty yards back from Walton’s, with the Escort four cars behind me. I pulled the handbrake on, then, ducking my head, I slid across and climbed out the passenger door.

  Crouched right down, and ignoring the curious gaze of the driver in the van behind me, I crept down the side of the van, and down the side of the two cars behind it. As I reached the Escort, out of the driver’s line of vision, with one hand I unholstered my Beretta from an inside pocket – clicking off the safety catch in the process – and with the other hand I opened the Escort’s door.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said, climbing in.

  He looked at me, at the gun, and at me again. It was either the gun or me that he didn’t like the look of, but I couldn’t immediately tell which. He was a youngster, no more than twenty, in a cheap brown suit, nylon shirt with broad stripes, and a vulgar blue tie with red blobs and yellow zig-zags. He had a thin layer of hair on his upper lip, where he thought he was growing a moustache, and a comb and a short ruler sticking out of his breast pocket. His eyes were open wide, and getting wider; his initial expression of dislike was fast turning to one of fear.

  ‘You’ve got five seconds to tell me who you’re working for before I shoot your balls off,’ I said. ‘One … two …’ A car in front started hooting – the traffic in front of the Jaguar had started to move. ‘Three …’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He spoke with an Irish accent.

  ‘Unless you tell me, I am going to pull the trigger in two seconds’ time – and I don’t really care whether you tell me or not,’ I said.

  He got the message.

  ‘Four …’

  ‘Cleary.’

  ‘Clever boy!’

  Another car and the van joined in the hooting.

  ‘Patrick Cleary,’ he said.

  ‘And who is Uncle Patrick and how do you come to be working for him?’

  He looked at the gun again. It was a particularly large and menacing-looking weapon. The wrong end of a Beretta 93R is not the most comforting sight in the world, and it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to scare, as much as blast, the living daylights out of people.

  ‘I don’t know who he is. I was offered the job by a bloke I met in a pub.’

  It seemed to me that the underworld led a pretty cushy life. Its inhabitants appeared to spend all their daytimes – when they weren’t on holiday on the Costa Brava – collecting things that had fallen off the backs of trucks, and all their evenings getting offered large sums of money for doing simple jobs for strangers they met in any pub they entered. ‘Bullshit. Who is he?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What was the name of the pub?’

  ‘Ring of Bells, Highgate.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  The car behind started hooting as well.

  ‘I don’t know, I told you.’

  ‘Who was the bloke you met in the pub?’

  ‘Mick.’

  ‘Describe him.’

  ‘Short guy, ginger hair.’

  ‘Smile, please!’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I’m taking your photo.’ I pointed my watch at him, and pushed a small button above the winder. There was a sharp click and a tiny whirr. A cacophony of hooting began both in front of us and behind us, simultaneously. ‘Mick who?’

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say.’

  ‘What did he ask you to do?’

  ‘Said I had to follow you; see where you went.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘T
hat’s all.’

  ‘How were you going to tell him?’

  ‘He said he would contact me.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘John – McEliney.’

  ‘Where are you from, John?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘Can I see your driving licence?’

  He pulled it out; it had his name on it and an address in Kilburn, North London. I photographed it and handed it back. The hooting was getting even worse.

  ‘How long have you been following me, John?’

  ‘This is the first time – just now.’

  ‘How many days have you waited?’

  ‘I just started today. He said you didn’t show for long periods sometimes.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Mick.’

  ‘Mick who?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know.’

  I pulled out my notebook, and from the back I tugged a plastic strip; a sheet of plastic came out. ‘Put your hands on that,’ I said. He did so. ‘Now push hard.’ He was shaking like a leaf. I took his fingerprints. ‘Now your thumb … good boy.’

  I put the plastic back in the notebook and put it in my pocket.

  ‘Was there anything else you wanted to see me about, John?’

  He looked at me oddly, then shook his head.

  ‘Good, then I’ll be off.’ I took hold of his ignition keys, switched off the ignition, then removed them, pocketing them as I left the car.

  The van driver in front had gone puce. He leaned his head out of the window and recited a very inadequate list of sexual organs and what can be done with them. He finished just as I shut my car door. ‘If that’s all you know,’ I said, ‘you can’t have a very interesting sex life.’

  He could certainly run fast. Luckily the light was green, and I accelerated through it, leaving him to shake his fist impotently. I forgot him, and concentrated on McEliney.

  I reckoned that McEliney had been telling the truth. He spoke with an Irish accent; Kilburn was an Irish colony in London. It was becoming pretty clear it wasn’t only Arabs and Russians and blacks that were involved in this little bit of no good; it was also the IRA. After the failure of the Arab to kill me, they had probably been instructed to watch me and see if they could figure out anything from my movements. The first time I had spotted them had been last night, in the blue Marina, and then again this morning. I wondered if they had been following me last week, and decided they hadn’t. I would have noticed them. No, the reason they hadn’t followed me last week was almost certainly because they hadn’t been able to find me. They had probably presumed I would be in my office at Portico, and had been keeping watch on that. They wouldn’t have had any reason to know I was at the Atomic Energy Authority; if they had known, they would have been tailing me from there. That was a big relief. If they had tumbled me at the AEA, I would have been blown; the whole damn thing would have been blown. Last night was the first time I had been in to Carlton House Terrace since my somewhat bumpy taxi-ride. It was also the first time a tail had picked me up. It made sense, and I felt a bit better; they had no idea what we were up to.